While walking outside on my way to an early meeting, between sips of coffee I was additionally jarred awake by a passing car with the music of Van Halen blaring through the speakers. As a fan of “early” Van Halen, I snickered to myself recalling the legend of the “Brown M&M’s” in their contract that was often joked about amongst musicians and DJ’s. Later that evening as I returned to my hotel room I did some research into the background of the “Brown M&M’s” story and quickly realized the importance of it with regards to contracts and dealing with third parties.

As many of you will surely know, Van Halen has been one of rock’s premier acts since the 1970’s. However, they were also one of the first bands to take on the road such a massive stage show consisting of, according to the band’s lead David Lee Roth, “Eight Hundred and fifty par lamp lights to illuminate the stage”. Due to the size of such a light set they struggled in the band’s early touring years to get the massive rig into many of the older arenas, as their loading dock doors were ill prepared to handle such a massive spectacle. Additionally, “there were many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through”. On top of all that, set up and tear-down times would “grossly exceed” the local union’s overtime, largely because of the time it took for the crew to set up and take down the production – all of which added to the cost of touring.

Roth noted that in most cases, the promotor wouldn’t fully read the contract and would therefore fail to take note of the various structural requirements required and understand the issues (such as loading bearing stress, electrical amperage, etc.) that could cause serious damage to the band, the crew, and even to the audience.

According to Roth, to help ensure compliance to the contract, they stuck in a clause in the technical section of the contract, requiring a bowl of M&M’s to be placed backstage but not to contain any “brown M&M’s”. Now this would normally be characterized as silly “rock star-like demands” being placed on the promotor and venue, but it was actually a rather clever test of whether or not the promotor and other notable parties had thoroughly reviewed and honored the contract fully, including how  the items it contained addressing safety concerns. Roth added that if a bowl of M&M’s was missing backstage, or if brown ones were present, then he and other band or crew members could safely assume that other items in the contract were not reviewed, glossed-over, or worse – completely ignored. The band members and crew would then be within their rights to have the venue inspect the work, ask that it be redone, and – per the terms inscribed in the contract – even force the promotor to forfeit the entire show at full pay. Their concern for safety was real as not only had equipment been damaged, but according to Roth, several members of their road crew were severely injured due to poor preparation and lack of appropriate safety measures on the part of the venue.

A great example he provided to drive home this wisdom was when Van Halen was playing at a university in the mid-west (his autobiography purports it as a gymnasium in Pueblo, Colorado, while an online interview with Roth purports it to be in New Mexico) Roth noted “the university took the contract rather casually”, adding further “they had one of these new rubberized bouncy basketball floorings in their arena. They hadn’t read the contract, and weren’t sure, really, about the weight of this production; this thing weighed like the business end of a 747.” He added that they found some brown M&M’s in the candy jar and Roth “went into full Shakespearean ‘What is this before me?’… and promptly trashed the dressing room, dumped the buffet, kicked a hole in the door…” causing approximately twelve thousand dollars’ worth of damage. He stated that they “didn’t bother to look at the weight requirements or anything (in the contract) and this sank through their new flooring and did eighty thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the arena floor. The whole thing had to be replaced.” Clearly, this could have been avoided if it were not to the ineffective or non-review of the physical requirements needed to hold such a concert.

On top of the structural damage – that had to be replaced – the press blamed Van Halen for the incident. “…It came out in the press that I discovered brown M&M’s and did eighty-five thousand dollars’ worth of damage to the backstage area”.

Can similar events happen to you? You bet. You may not have to deal with moving around massive light and sound fixtures from one town to the next, but how truly confident are you that your vendors really understand what you is required of them? Have you built conditions, service-level bench marks, touch-points, and penalties into the contracts? Are they understood and agreed to by all before it becomes fully executed? Part of employing sound principles of contract review is reviewing all documents with all affected parties (both vendor and business line) and making sure that they not only understand the terms laid out in the contract but that they can fulfil all stated obligations.

The final takeaway of this piece is to remind you of the importance of going over the details – you know, those small things which can lead to bigger problems. It’s a good idea to employ the advice from legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden who used to say “It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.”

So, with that, do you prefer plain or peanut?

We’ve all experienced the end of a relationship. Sometimes the two parties involved are no longer compatible. Maybe one party realizes that it just isn’t working out. Or they’ve found someone better. Or perhaps there’s been an unforgivable breach of contract.

Naturally we’re talking about an organization’s partnership with a third-party provider and the importance of mitigating third-party risk. There’s a distinct lifecycle to every business relationship—new relationships, existing and evergreen relationships, renewals and terminations.

Managing third-party contracts can be a delicate matter throughout this lifecycle. When it comes to terminating these contracts, the need to have a well-defined strategy already in place is paramount. A contingency plan built upon established business standards and best practices can help avoid damages, alleviate any reputational risks, and help facilitate a smooth exit.

There are four basic types of termination:

• Normal: The business relationship is no longer necessary or appropriate
• Cause: There is irreparable violation of contract terms
• Convenience: Either you or the vendor has a better arrangement/opportunity
• Regulatory/supervisory: The vendor cannot live up to regulatory expectations

“Third Party Contract Development, Adherence & Management,” © 2018 The Santa Fe Group, Shared Assessments Program

It’s crucial to ensure that the predetermined terms of the contract are acceptably fulfilled in the final stages of the third-party vendor relationship. This includes any ongoing services with the departing vendor; recovery of work product and intellectual property; data recovery and security; and a seamless transition to the new provider, if applicable.

More specific best practices will need to be implemented if the contract was terminated for cause. For example, was the provider appropriately rated? Did internal controls or assessment methods fail? Was Pen (penetration) testing conducted and evaluated by credentialed testers? These questions can help safeguard third-party business relationships and guide future contract negotiation processes.

In business, as in one’s personal life, it always helps to have an exit strategy, based on open communication and shared expectations agreed upon from the very beginning.

And, you should probably get that in writing.

A brief chat with Tom Garrubba, Senior Director/CISO of Shared Assessment, The Santa Fe Group

In your experience, what are some of the core reasons that a third-party contract is terminated for cause (i.e. fraud or misrepresentation)? What are some examples?

In most cases [the third party] is just not able to achieve what fits into the agreement. Basic cause is when vendors overpromise and underdeliver. Or if they’re falling way behind and start grossly misrepresenting what they said they could do. We need to monitor the contracts. You should be getting something back from the vendor for not living up to contract expectations.

I was in a situation at my previous employer where we had a vendor that did something kind of crafty. A company can turn to a vendor and say, we don’t really have much of an increase in budget next year so we need you guys to hold on to your fees. So this vendor took its offshore support and shifted it from India to China because it’s much lower cost.

They did it on the backend. They’re still supporting your system but now the cost went from $100/hour to $60/hour and they never told the business unit. They didn’t break the contract per se but what they did was kind of unethical, doing something and not telling us about it. You can’t say at that point, I’m taking my ball and going home. But they were banned from all new projects and not allowed to bid on upcoming projects.

How can a business protect itself to mitigate the inherent risks of working with third-party providers?

Get everything in the contract. Organizations I’ve had conversations with are not very good at it – they’re working in a silo. Sometimes they don’t want to focus on risk because they want to get things up and running.

It’s that assurance time of year again as organizations are kicking into the implementation of their 2018 external audit engagements. We are now under the six-month timeline for new SOC standards to be in place. This is the third year in a row I’ve written about changes in external audit reporting standards that impact service provider controls and executing external assurance engagements. Each year the changes drive maturity, transparency and stronger governance into the process, but also create confusion and need for knowledge. So, let’s dust off the boxing gloves and understand the new assessment protocols that will be in place once we jump back into the audit boxing ring.

Acronyms, Terminology & Methodology – Alphabet Soup
Heavyweight sports fans know terms like Knockout (KO), Clinch. Down & Out. Fall Through the Ropes. Sucker Punch. Throw in the Towel. Prizefighter auditors and assurance practitioners understand terms like AICPA, Attestation. SOC, SSAE18, TSC, CSOC, Carve-outs. Subservice organizations. Qualified Opinion. Information security and IT professionals rely on frameworks like COSO, NIST, and COBIT.

While the terms are quite different the work effort to simply navigate audit standard changes easily creates emotional comparisons to a few of those boxing terms, especially for the non-accountant. Let’s level set on a few of the key concepts that are changing within SOC engagements, but from a more sports fan or business user point of view.

The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) is the national professional organization that sets ethical standards for the profession and U.S. auditing standards for audits of private companies, non-profits, and governments. They have updated their standards and protocols for audit engagements to align with the 2013 Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) framework which was designed to assess the design, implementation, and maintenance of internal controls and assess their effectiveness. COSO frameworks are traditionally part of the SOX compliance program for financial accounting of public companies.

The changes in the SOC audit reporting will be effective for audit periods ending on or after December 15th, 2018 . That means the changes will be effective for all engagements in 2019, triggering readiness, migration, and process changes in 2018. During this transition, for audit engagements executed in 2018, a company can choose to early adopt the new criteria structure or continue with the current Trust Services Principles.

Report Changes and Updated Naming Conventions
The methodology standards set out in the SSAE18 framework will now apply to all SOC2/SOC3 reports. Those changes include the requirements to clarify control ownership when there are subcontractors or sub-service organizations in scope for the system being assessed. With the remapping effort to the COSO framework, additional terminology changes for SOC audit reports have been defined:

• SOC: Was Service & Organizational Control and now is System & Organizational Control.
• SSAE: Statements on Standards for Attestation Engagements.
• TSPC and TSC: Trust Services Principles & Criteria (TSPC) are being renamed Trust Services Criteria(TSC)
• Principles & Categories: Principles will now be called categories, but they still focus on security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of a system.
• Risks/Controls: Within the report structure and protocol, the assessor will now use terminology of “points of focus” for the specific control topic area being reviewed.

A SOC2 report must include the Security Category, with all the Common Criteria, and may include the additional categories. Each category will have their own unique criteria to be met as part of the audit. These changes expanded the number of common control criteria and streamlined some of the additional criteria in the Trust Services Categories.

It is important for all organizations to prepare for the new requirements to build out process maturity in conjunction with this year’s audit engagement. The requirements will apply to service providers who use a SOC report to provide assurance to their clients; but also, will trigger changes to the processes a service provider uses to get assurance from its fourth parties.

Implications for Service Providers
External assurance audit reports are a mechanism to provide independent assurance and testing of controls. Each service provider defines the type of audit engagement needed to meet their client contractual obligations based on the systems and services that are outsourced. With the growing focus on cyber security and enterprise risk management, many of the changes in common controls have broadened beyond traditional IT controls or public company financial controls. The shift to include risk management functions and programs will trigger the need for additional control owners, compliance documentation, processes to be tested, and includes operational risk management programs.

There are eight new common criteria related to the alignment with COSO principles:

• Board oversight
• Use of information to support internal control
• Sufficiency and clarity of the entity’s objectives
• Identification and assessment of changes
• Controls deployed through formal policies and procedures
• Procedures to identify new vulnerabilities
• Business disruption risk mitigation
• Vendor and business risk management

Third party risk management functions may be implicated in many of these criteria but the focus on Vendor and Business Risk Management as a common control in scope for all engagements shows the growing attention to third party risk. The inclusion will provide a deeper dive into the third-party risk management program structure, implementation, governance and risk reporting. The third-party risk management program elements that will be assessed, audited, and tested include:

• Requirements for Vendor and Business Partner Engagements
• Vendor and Business Partner Risks
• Responsibility and Accountability for Managing Vendors and Business Partners.
• Communication Protocols for Vendors and Business Partners.
• Exception Handling Procedures from Vendors and Business Partners.
• Vendor and Business Partner Performance.
• Procedures for Addressing Issues Identified During Vendor and Business Partner Assessments.
• Procedures for Terminating Vendor and Business Partner Relationships.
• Process to obtains Confidentiality Commitments from Vendors and Business Partners.
• Assessment process for Compliance with Confidentiality Commitments of Vendors and Business Partners.
• Process to obtains Privacy Commitments from Vendors and Business Partners.
• Assessment process for Compliance with Privacy Commitments of Vendors and Business Partners.

Each of these operational processes are part of the implementation of a third-party risk management program structure. However, to make the controls auditable and testable will require not only compliance documentation but artifacts and testing of the controls, to provide evidence to auditors of the implementation of the third -party governance program requirements. Multiple regulatory drivers are triggering changes to mature the third- party risk governance process. Creating an external assurance maturity calendar, requires taking a long view, embedding into readiness this year for what is tested next year.

Business Readiness
While it can be easy to feel like throwing in the towel, the reality is the SOC boxing matches will continue, and evolve as new scoring mechanisms are defined. Here are six readiness steps to tackle, one per month to avoid feeling on the ropes or down for the count while you prepare for an audit of your third-party risk governance program.

1. Policies: Review and create a comparison of the Vendor and Risk Management criteria to your Third-Party Policies and Procedures. Plan for need for additional compliance documentation, process maps.

2. Employee Knowledge: Prepare employees who manage controls, by sending out a self-assessment of their understanding of the roles, accountabilities and governance for third party risk. Update control owners, assess internal expertise and identify gaps
3. Technology: Conduct an assessment with your current GRC tools to prepare for any IT or configuration changes
4. Benchmark: Refresh benchmarking the maturity of your Third-Party Program to the Vendor Risk Management Maturity Model
5. Risk Reporting: Review existing scorecards, dashboards and management reporting on third party risk governance and identify changes to meet the new common criteria.
6. Process Refinement: Embed security, confidentiality, and privacy commitment processes into a common third party continuous monitoring process.

Yes, audit standard changes can feel daunting, and complex. However, just like there are weight levels in boxing to make the fights fair, assessing a third-party program is also risk based. Focus on the critical activities, critical services, critical controls, and third-party relationships, most of these requirements are not dramatically new, they are simply driving maturity into the third-party risk governance program that have been in place for financial controls.

Linnea Solem is a former Shared Assessments Program Steering Committee Chairperson, and current Advisory Board Member. She is the President and Founder of Solem Risk Partners, LLC a management consulting and advisory services company focused on Third Party Risk Governance, Privacy Program Management, and Enterprise Risk Management.

The tone of resilience followed the 11^th Annual Shared Assessments Summit to the Santa Fe, New Mexico home of Catherine A. Allen, Chairman and CEO of The Santa Fe Group. Recovering from an email hack, Cathy hosted sixty guests who enjoyed her signature Missouri ham, dined al fresco in the courtyard as the sun set, and listened to an esteemed panel of subject matter experts speak about Cyberwarfare and National Security: What Americans Need to Know.

Senator Jeff Bingaman, former US State Senator from New Mexico, reinforced the importance of cyber issues and the urgent need for Congress to understand this importance. He introduced the evening’s panelists including:

• Catherine A. Allen, The Santa Fe Group
• Mark Fidel, Co-Founder of RiskSense, Inc.
• Damon Martinez, Former U.S. Attorney and Congressional Candidate
• Valerie Plame, Former CIA Operative, Author and Cyber Expert

Damon Martinez, former U.S. Attorney and Congressional candidate, covered cyber threats to our democracy, the evolution of protection technologies, protecting voting machines and the undermining of the fundamental basics of our democracy. He spoke about the role of New Mexico National Labs, airspace and missiles and showed Russia’s development of strikingly similar technology to ours, subsequent to us developing it first, in his handout entitled “Emerging Threats: Russian Interference in U.S. Elections and the New Frontier of Cyber Security”.

Mark Fidel, Co-Founder of RiskSense, Inc. focused on vulnerabilities including threat and vulnerability management, election systems vulnerabilities, and the supply chain of digital information that serves the labs in and out of New Mexico. Citing the issues surrounding our election system, Mark described the various vendors involved with the management of the voting process and his commitment to shoring up our systems to protect our democracy and to ensuring a fair, free, and accurate election process.

Valerie Plame, former CIA operative, author, and cyber expert shared her expertise in nuclear proliferation and experience with The New War: Cyberwarfare. Valerie described the relationship between international security and cyberwarfare, our adversaries, and why we should be concerned about Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. Speaking to the gray area between war and peace, she explained the financial benefits of war to a few versus the low profit margin of fighting cyberwarfare.

Catherine A. Allen, Chairman and CEO at The Santa Fe Group and corporate board director, explained the concern of cyberwarfare and critical infrastructures as well as the impact of cyber tactics. Sitting on several boards including that of El Paso Electric Company, Cathy knows the corporate perspective on cyberwarfare. She described the impact of fake news with a visual graphic in hand and reinforced the importance of data integrity. In addition to the media biased chart, The Santa Fe Group provided handouts and multiple relevant materials to guests, including Cathy’s “Cyberwarfare and Critical Infrastructures” and the Ponemon Institute’s “Second Annual Study on The Internet of Things (IoT): A New Era of Third-Party Risk” sponsored by Shared Assessments, a program under The Santa Fe Group umbrella. Handouts quickly moved into guest’s hands as Cathy emphasized that protecting one’s personal and company assets are a must in today’s world of new warfare.

Stating there are not enough people in public policy who are aware of cyber issues and the impact associated, panelists recapped their concerns and suggestions as:

• Heighten awareness of one’s own biases – go far and wide and beyond
• Education is key
• Think
• Stay strong and informed
• Voice your concerns about cyberwarfare and the threat to our democracy and safety to your Congressmen
• Vote

The sun set. And as guests left, they left more aware of cyber threats, than when they arrived, with a tone of resilience.

Sylvie Obledo is a Project Manager with The Santa Fe Group, Shared Assessments Program. As Project Manager, Sylvie facilitates thought leadership and collaboration of leadership teams and a variety of groups including the Continuous Monitoring Working Group and Vertical Strategy Groups in industry sectors including Asset Management, Consumer Product Goods, and Insurance. Her scope of work requires creative problem solving, planning, organization, and managing multiple timelines.

Our 11^th Annual Shared Risk Assessments Summit took place on April 11-12 at the Ritz Carlton in Pentagon City, VA and brought together thought leaders throughout the risk industry. The theme of this year’s Summit was resilience, and our 300+ attendees were able to hear from subject matter experts across an array of different industries on how to stay resilient amongst an abundance of new concerns.

Opening Remarks

The day started with opening remarks from our CEO, Catherine Allen, who discussed these new concerns, namely, cyber warfare, fake news, supply chain disruptions, AI, and IoT, and how to focus on detection strategies—we live in an era of when, not if. Following her opening remarks, she introduced our keynote speaker, and first ever recipient of our new Lifetime Achievement Award, Richard Clarke.

The Importance of Cassandras in Risk

Clarke, CEO of Good Harbor LLC, explained the importance of “Cassandras” in assessing risk. AI, genetic engineering, and the IoT are all current fields where experts have data that proves we are going to have significant problems, but nothing is being done about it.

When it comes to risk management at the national and corporate level, these outlier experts are being ignored. Clarke stressed the importance of systematically looking for Cassandras and being willing to listen them, despite the risk seeming outlandish, or even laughable.

While we don’t necessarily need to believe the Cassandra, we do need to give them enough credibility to show the data. Companies may need to adjust so that when they start to see what the Cassandra is predicting, they’ll already have contingency plans in place. As risk professionals, we need to take heed of the Cassandras, start making decisions, and reallocating resources in order to do things differently and mitigate the effects of catastrophic events.

New Vulnerabilities

Following Clarkes eye-opening keynote, we began our first panel discussion entitled, “The Future is Now: Emerging Technologies and the Impact on Controls.” The panel, moderated by Joe Prochaska, Synovus Financial Corp, included Holly Dockery, Sandia National Laboratories; Catherine Lotrionte, Georgetown University; and Jeff DeCoux, Hangar Technology. The panel focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT)—one of the main takeaways was the vulnerability that these new devices open us up to, and how manufacturers need to start stepping up and start involving the entire management team when evaluating the risks and exposures of their devices. Everyone should have visibility into what their technology can do and what the risks could entail.

Frameworks to Make the Dream Work

After a brief networking break, we began our second panel discussion on “Third Party Risk Frameworks.” The panel, moderated by Roger Parsley, Deutsche Bank, included Mark Holladay, Synovus Financial Corporation; Lin Lu, Freddie Mac; and Renee Forney, Capital One; and focused on how third party risk management fits into different organizations. The panel agreed that we in a new era of risk management, so it’s crucial to increase our skills and expertise in order to fulfill our responsibilities, no matter what the size of our organization. While risk classifications have changed over time, tiering is still important and mission critical vendors are integral to our risk framework, whether we’re at a small company, financial institution, or enterprise corporation. Lin Lu, Freddie Mac, said it best when she stated, “…third party risk is no different than any other risk.” Additionally, the panel touched on how emerging technologies are impacting how we handle third party risk and the importance of scalability. Organizations need to ask themselves:

• What risks do we have?
• What risks are we willing to take?
• What risks are we not willing to take?
• How does that impact the strategic goals of our business?

Believe in Your Mission

Following the frameworks panel, we enjoyed a case study presented by Prevalent. Brenda Ferraro, Senior Director, led the discussion with customer Bob Maley, Senior Strategist at PayPal.  Maley stressed the importance of understanding your company’s mission—if you’re building a program that’s driving your mission, when the regulators and examiners come in, it’s going to be easy. He also introduced the concepts of Chen, the things that everybody knows you do, and Chi, the unexpected, and explained how they relate to risk—if we do the same things over and over, the chen and chi flip. We have to figure out unique ways of staying ahead and understanding the risk of our vendors.

Making a Vendor Naughty List

After a delicious lunch buffet, and Solutions Showcases presented by Prevalent and Security Scorecard, we returned to hear insights on third party risk and resiliency from industry thought-leader Jim Routh. Routh gave us the frightening example of “Tina and Tony,” the office manager and broker who did not go through the proper authentication processes when using Amazon Web Services. Since “Tony” did not like passwords, there was no encryption or logging, which led to a security researcher finding and publishing the data, ultimately leaving him without a business. The main takeaway from Rouths’ presentation was the need to educate our third party vendors on their configuration of cloud controls. Finally, if you don’t have a vendor naughty list, you should—vendors need to be held accountable to the same high internal standards.

Will China Overtake Us?

Perhaps even more frightening than Routh’s “Tony and Tiny” example were John M. B. O’Connor’s thoughts on supply chain risk. O’Connor, Chief  Executive Officer, J.H. Whitney Investment Management, LLC highlighted the fact that we’re stepping into an unknown domain of technological complexity and the need to pivot hard and fast to global geo-politics, or risk being overtaken by China. O’Connor even cited how Henry Kissinger spent the majority of his career making sure the US was always more important to China than Russia. We need to widen our aperture and observe more broadly in order to put ourselves at the strategic level and fight at the strategic level.

People are the Problem… And the Solution

After this frighteningly eye-opening presentation, O’Connor joined our next panel discussion, which included Jim Routh, Chief Security Officer, Aetna, and Rocco Grillo, Executive Managing Director, Stroz Friedberg, for a discussion on resiliency. They highlighted how people are our biggest strength, but also our biggest vulnerability. We have to use the innovation in technology to shrink the threat of risk and acknowledge that behaviors at every level are subject to continuous monitoring. Redundancy is expensive and useless—we need to define resilience, create a sense of community that can endure stress, and have faith in the resilience of these community members to be strong enough to let go of the superficial senses of privacy.

Maintaining Personal Resilience

Following a brief networking break where attendees were able to mingle with our exhibitors, we returned for a heart-warming discussion on personal resiliency with Ambassador (ret.) Mary Ann Peters, Chief Executive Officer, Carter Center. According to Peters, who has had a long and rewarding career where she had to quickly adapt to different cultures, the top 5 keys to personal resilience are:

1) Be flexible and adapt to change

2) Embrace ambiguity

3) Get tough, but stay charming

4) Learn from mistakes and failures

5) Focus on helping others

Get Your Regulatory Geek On

Day one concluded with a panel discussion on the regulatory landscape, moderated by Ken Mortensen, Data Protection Officer, InterSystems Corporation, with panelists Valerie Abend, Managing Director, Accenture Security; Kevin Greenfield, Director for Bank Information Technology, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency; and Adam Greene, Partner, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP. As we watched Abend get her “regulatory geek” on, we were asked to contemplate our responsibilities in terms of the broader environments. As third party risk analysts, we need to push the needle a bit more, ask ourselves where we are going to start to fix some of the problems, and ensure that we’re operating at the level we need to operate with the level of assurance that every one of our parties is going to be confident in.

Celebrating Day One

We ended the first day of the conference with a reception, sponsored by SecurityScorecard—appetizers, refreshments, and networking with other risk professionals were the perfect conclusion to day one of our 11^th Annual Shared Assessments Summit.

Stay tuned for our summary of day two!

Last week at the Shared Assessments Annual Summit on third party risk, I had the chance to co-facilitate a half-day workshop on The Pivot to Codification of Best Practices of Third Party Risk Management Best Practices, plus moderate a discussion panel on the current privacy landscape.  Not surprising that GDPR was top of mind for many of the over 300 third party risk professional attendees, but so was digital privacy a topic not often deeply discussed when addressing the tenets of third party oversight. But, as risk professionals know, timing is everything. Having a third-party risk summit in Washington D.C during testimony by Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, made for lively and thought-provoking dialog by participants.

While the starting point of the dialog was on the state of GDPR readiness, the overarching themes started to emerge in a broader context.  So, let’s get the GDPR discussion out of the way, and the tipping point we experienced in our workshop and panel.

Five things on GDPR

1. GDPR enforcement is close – the grace period is ending
2. GDPR is complex due to unintended consequences
3. There are no simple guarantees to determine if your vendors are GDPR compliance
4. Following the data daisy chain is daunting to determine GDPR scope
5. It’s a cloudy legal environment – GDPR guidelines require context and interpretation

The dialog on data maps, data protection impact assessments, data transfers, breach notification, and subcontractors are familiar concepts to most Information Technology, Security, and Risk Professionals. Whether requirements are coming from GDPR, OCC, NY DFS Section 500 or SEC Cybersecurity Disclosure Guidance, the expectations for maturing third party risk oversight are maturing along common themes.

The hype on GDPR has been the fear in the C-Suite of the potential for 4% fines and the burden it will place on many organizations to address new obligations. However, GDPR constructs of Data Controller” and “Data Processor” roles are becoming a more accepted framework internationally when looked at from the data subject point of view.  Implementing data portability and the right to be forgotten are absolutely requirements focused on the rights of the data subject.  At its core, GDPR is all about privacy rights, which is beyond a compliance checklist, but speaks to the culture and ethics of organizations. Focusing on only meeting the “legal” obligation vs. what is “right” thing to do can be short sighted.

Many organizations may be missing an opportunity to treat GDPR readiness as an opportunity to affirm customer trust. Transparency and disclosure of consumer privacy rights should not be simply looked at as a compliance burden, but an opportunity to send a positive message to customers.  Don’t let the customer or data subject become the last area of focus in your readiness and GDPR program management plan.

The consumer theme became even more apparent due to the serendipity of having risk management sessions amid congressional Facebook, Inc. testimony.  The questioning on data sharing and usage disclosures requires looking at this not only from an organizational but consumer’s rights point of view. While the audience makeup was more technology savvy than other conferences I have attended, it was sadly amusing to see how little some of our D.C. legislators knew about how social media works. Data sharing platforms are designed to deliver customized content.  The purpose of the platform is about collecting and using data to sell content and provide a consumer application. Customization can’t occur without collecting and using elements of data. The concept of consent and how it is obtained I think will be the broader implication to reconciling U.S. Privacy Law and EU based models.

We are living in a mobile world that is becoming even more digitally connected, with layers of third party relationships involved in the internet ecosystem. That genie is out of the bottle to use a tired expression, but now that genie is in the cloud, and there is not any going back to the days of analog.

Five things on Digital Privacy

1. Make sure that social media/web marketing providers have contracts that outline not only their obligations but the limitations they must adhere to.
2. For marketers, educate within your organization on the differences between explicit and implicit consent. Likely your own C-Suite may not understand those differences and the limitations on data utilization.
3. Remember that customers have a short attention span and memory of what they agreed to when they signed up for a service. Don’t just inform when a change has occurred but put reminders into ongoing campaigns.
4. Privacy is personal. Just like there are different risk appetites, there are different privacy appetites. Recognize that you must think about customers from both ends of the privacy risk continuum.
5. Don’t just hide the terms in the click agreement – enable privacy preferences with easy to use options. Put the consumer or data subject first.

Our ending privacy take-away to the attendees, was to get yourself a rubber bracelet, commonly used to promote causes, but this time your cause is the consumer or data subject. That privacy bracelet, “What Would Data Subjects Want” is your litmus test to assessing requirements, changes, or interpretation for those gray areas of privacy compliance. So, wear your privacy bracelet with pride as a constant reminder as you navigate the upcoming year of change in privacy and data protection!  #WWDSW

Privacy Panel:  (Moderator) Linnea Solem, President Solem Risk Partners, LLC and Advisory Board Member and Chairperson of the Shared Assessments Program Privacy Working Group; Andrew McDevitt, Sr. Privacy Analyst, Northrop Grumman; Nathan Johnson, Sr. Privacy Manager, Eli Lilley and Company; and Lisa Berry-Tayman, Sr. Manager, Cyberscout Solutions.